Tag: survival games

Early Days in The Planet Crafter

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Planet Crafter is yet another survival-box game that happened to hit Xbox Game Pass just as my Solarpunk infatuation was starting to wane. (Solarpunk was a great game. I’d just done pretty much everything there was to do.) Crafting a whole planet, though? That sounded like a serious challenge so I took it for a spin.

This time out, you’ve crash-landed on a barren planet. First order of business? Oxygen. You have a suit that only holds a very small amount of oxygen. You dash out of your escape pod, harvest some minerals, then head back into the pod to craft things and replenish your O2. One of your first goals will probably be crafting better O2 tanks so you can travel further. You also have food and hydration meters; but what is there to eat or drink on a barren planet?

One of the trickiest bits in survival-box games is the survival part. If one goal is to survive then the fail state has to be not surviving. So what happens when you die? How do you making dying a fail state that penalizes the player enough that they want to avoid failing, but not so much that your average gamer gets frustrated and quits. These games tend to be about exploring and figuring things out and if the death penalty is too harsh then players aren’t going to want to take too many chances. In this regard Planet Crafters plays it pretty safe. When you die you drop some items in a nice neat storage chest, then you respawn in a base or your Pod (I THINK it respawns you in the last place that held oxygen but I’m not too sure) and run back out and pick the stuff up again.

Considering your limited range (at least in the early game) due to O2 concerns, your dropped stuff is never very far away. In fact maximum efficiency might come from just ignoring the food and water stuff completely and accepting that every so often you’ll respawn and have to collect your stuff. I don’t play this way because I’m a fan of the I word (immersion) and I tend to ‘roleplay’ in games like this, so I try my best not to die of starvation, asphyxiation, or dehydration.

I actually prefer an easier death penalty that I can make more difficult via self-imposed rules (even ones as simple as “Try your best to stay alive even if the death penalty is quite light”) than one that is unforgiving, so while I do think they erred on “too little” of a death penalty I MUCH prefer that to having a severe death penalty.

Red-tinged image of my 'starter base' showing a building, drill and windmill
This is pretty much what your first hours are going to look like. Red-tinged, kind of bleak

Honestly The Planet Crafter didn’t make a great first impresion on me. It was just SO bleak and exploration was tough due to the O2 limitations. What I did, and I assume most people do, is build a string of tiny bases that you can duck into to refill your oxygen tanks. You CAN also craft O2 Refill Tanks but those use resources, take up precious inventory space, and vanish when used. A 1×1 base gets created once and it always there when you need oxygen.

In fact after my first session I was ready to put the game aside, but fortunately for me Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob was also playing. I read one of his posts about the game and it finally hit me that we’re here to terraform and as we do, things look less bleak. The game did try to tell me this; the “getting started” goal is called Blue Skies or something like that.

You terraform the planet by building machines that add O2 to the atmosphere (via plants), add pressure to the atmosphere (by drilling into the crust… not sure how that would work in real life but it’s how it works here) and by heating the atmosphere (via heaters). All these require resources and power. Power comes from windmills and solar cells which of course also require resources. This is all fairly abstract but it works. As the planet’s terraform rating increases new tech automagically unlocks. Power seems to be universal; there are no cables and aparently no distance limits. If you put up a solar panel on one end of the map it seems to happily power stuff on the other end of the map, via magic. That sounds odd but within the context of the game it works fine. I think having to run power cables across this rather large map would be a headache.

I’m definitely enjoying the game now, but I’m still not sure it’ll be a long-term title for me. I’m playing solo, or course, and I feel like there’s a LOT to do for one person. Most of my time has been spent building bases to expand the area I can explore. And you do need to explore. While you can harvest a lot of materials from mineral deposits on the ground (deposits that get replenished via some pretty cool meteor impacts), some of what you need has to be scavenged from crashed space ships (food, for example. You can ‘craft’ water from ice, but for your first hours of playing the only source of food is scavenging packets of “space food” from chests and ships), and these tend to be relatively far flung. At my point in the game I don’t have a vehicle so there’s a LOT of running back and forth which is what generally causes me to end a session; knowing I have item X in a storage chest in the base I built next to the wrecked ship that is barely in view and that’ll take me a ton of running to get to. Yeah, that feels like a good time to take a break. 🙂

Mind you, I still haven’t finished the ‘intro’ section of the game called First Steps or something. But the sky above my base is lightening and starting to turn blue, which is pretty neat. Seems local though since if I push out into the wilderness the world turns bleak again. So we’ll see.

Over on Steam Planet Crafter has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating with over 36,000 reviews as I’m typing this. There’s also a demo available in case you want to check it out, but I hope the demo isn’t just the start of the game because that really does feel grim. Also I thought it was a new game since it just hit Game Pass/consoles but it looks like it released in April of 2024. Huh. “Recent Reviews” are still Overwhelmingly Positive, though!

A High-Five for the Solarpunk Devteam

Posted on by Nimgimli

I mentioned over on Mastodon that I was coming to the end of my time with Solarpunk, not because I’m tired of the game but just because I’ve unlocked pretty much everything [I think] other than decorative items and I am not much of a decorator (sadly).

I never even really intended to play Solarpunk. My initial download (it’s on Gamepass) was a result of some jokes about how frequently we’re seeing “punk” added to the end of a word these days. Solarpunk was a lark at first, but then I really got into it.

It isn’t that the gameplay itself is all that unique, and there isn’t any kind of story. You gather, you craft simple items. You build workbenches and research stations and then you use the things you crafted to unlock new machines and new recipies for more advanced stuff. There’re some automation aspects, too. It’s all things we’ve done before, this time in a combat-free, and pretty much stress-free, environment.

Initially your power source will be burning things. Wood and leaves at first. Then wax bricks made from cloth (which comes from the cotton you’ve been farming) and wax (collected from beehives that you built… the bees show up automagically). Then you’ll unlock solar panels — unsurprising given the name. You’ll research batteries so you can store that juice for night time or rainy days. After that you get windmills and then giant wind turbines which hover well above your island, powering lots of stuff. I was a bit surprised that solar power became somewhat redundant! The wind is pretty constant, day or night.

One of the first automations you’ll unlock are drills. You put these on mineral resources that are scattered around the islands. Your first island has iron, a nearby one has copper and so on. The farthest flung islands have diamonds. Drills need power: you can set up a furnace that burns things, but using solar panels or windmills is going to be your ultimate goal.

Flying between the islands (which float in the sky) to gather the resources your drills have produced is initially fun, and just about the time it starts to feel a slight bit tedious you’ll unlock drones that will fly off and collect the ore for you. Of course these need power, too!

Solarpunk screenshot showing a first person view of coming in to a dock in the air ship
There’s one of my drones hard at work!

And here’s my first reason for giving the devs a high-five. The drones are physically modeled. You can watch them lift off and then head off towards their destination. I assumed, initially, that once they were out of sight they would despawn, and after some appropriate amount of time they would respawn laden with ore and a variable somewhere would decrement the amount of ore at the drill. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. When you’re out in the airship you can see your drones flying around, and they really are modeled for the entirety of the trip. I’m not sure exactly WHY I’m impressed by this, but I am.

And then there’s the weather. Your one true enemy in this game is storms. They’ll flatten your crops and they can even harm you if you get hit by lighting. The skies grow dark as can be and thick clouds roll in. One of my deaths came when I was trying to get back to my ‘home’ island at the height of a storm. It was so dark visibility was near zero. I was squinting at the screen and suddenly a mountain loomed out of the darkness and I flew dead on into it. Splat.

Before lightning strikes you’ll see electrical arcs forming on the ground, then BAM! The lighting and thunder is loud enough and abrupt enough to actually startle you.

Then as the storm starts to wind down, the clouds break up and you can fly in and out of them… the clouds are also physically modeled. Some are white fluffy things and others are dark and forboding.

The most distant islands are cold. When you are on those and it rains, instead of rain you get snow. OK actually it looks a little more like hail. But considering you’ll only be able to get to these islands near the end game, and that they’re far enough out you won’t probably make any more trips than neccesary for to them, that they added snow for this tiny slice of the gameplay was another thing that impressed me.

Solarpunk screenshot showing a storm in progress
I need to rig up a rain sensor so the sprinklers turn off during storms. Also low-key proud that I almost caught that lightning strike!

Oh also worth noting that sometimes it just rains, without the storming bit. The wind changes direction too which doesn’t have much of an impact on gameplay, but it does cause all your windmills and wind turbines to rotate accordingly.

There are just all these little details that they really didn’t need to put into the game, but these are also the tiny touches that, for me at least, made it pretty special. I hope there’s a Solarpunk 2, or an expansion or something. All these detailed systems they’ve created need to come back in other forms. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

The only place I felt like the game fell a little short is with the hunger/thirst system. It is super easy to keep these topped up, and yet there’s a whole cooking system where you can make better and better foods. It’s nice for immersion but I basically lived on watermelons for most of the game.

Oh, there’re also farm animals: chickens give eggs, sheep give sheep’s milk and pigs give…. truffles. Whew, I don’t have to turn Doodle, my pig friend, into bacon. These animals add add more infrastructure: they need shelters built as well as to be fed and watered (eventually you can automate this). Oh, and transport. You don’t want to have to fly from island to island just to give your animals food and water, so there’s a system to fly them between islands. But you have to research and build it!

The most amazing part of all this is that apparently Cyberwave, the development studio, is apparently a 2-person studio (though they used another team to do ports.. the game is on everything from Steam to Switch). Here’s a YouTube video about the team and the game:

Sometimes a game comes along and just grabs you. And sometimes you feel like it’s only you! On Steam Solarpunk has a very positive rating but only around 1,600 reviews, which seems low. It’s not an expensive game ($22.99 on Steam with no sale running) and my first playthrough is sitting at around 30 hours with maybe a couple more to go.